The official blog of the Campaign for the American Reader, an independent initiative to encourage more readers to read more books.

Thursday, January 07, 2016

Five of the best evil lieutenants in SF/F

Jeff Somers is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series from Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket/Gallery. He has published over thirty short stories as well. One of Somers's five best evil lieutenants (or "dragons") in SF/F, as shared at the B & N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:

Best Backstory for an Evil Lieutenant: The Witch King of Angmar in The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings gets name-checked a lot when discussing just about anything in fantasy, so it’s no surprise it offers up one of the most coolest Dragons ever (one that is, yes, an actual dragon), the Witch King of Angmar, a.k.a. the Lord of the Nazgûl. Simply being the Black Captain of Mordor is cool enough, but the Witch King’s history—some of which is only detailed in Tolkien’s notes—makes him a tragic figure, too. Likely a Númenórean (and thus possibly Aragorn’s distant cousin), he was a powerful and noble man fooled into accepting one of Sauron’s Rings of power thousands of years before the events of the novels. Immortal, and with his already badass powers enhanced, the Witch King became the second-most feared entity in the world by the time a Hobbit and a young woman managed to kill him, fulfilling the prophecy that no man could harm him.